TY - JOUR
AU - Weitzman,Martin
TI - A Voting Architecture for the Governance of Free-Driver Externalities, with Application to Geoengineering
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 18622
PY - 2012
Y2 - December 2012
DO - 10.3386/w18622
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18622
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18622.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Martin Weitzman
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer 313
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-5133
Fax: 617/495-8570
E-Mail: mweitzman@harvard.edu
AB - Climate change is a global "free rider" problem because significant abatement of greenhouse gases is an expensive public good requiring international cooperation to apportion compliance among states. But it is also a global "free driver" problem because geoengineering the stratosphere with reflective particles to block incoming solar radiation is so cheap that it could essentially be undertaken unilaterally by one state perceiving itself to be in peril. This paper develops the main features of a "free driver" externality in a simple model based on the asymmetric consequences of type-I and type-II errors. I propose a social-choice decision architecture based on the solution concept of a supermajority voting rule and derive its basic properties. In the model this supermajority voting rule attains the socially optimal cooperative solution, which is a new theoretical result around which the paper is built.
ER -